In Construction, Overload Sounds Like “This is Stupid”
There was a moment about a decade ago, one of those moments where it clicked. In the midst of a massive tech overhaul, a superintendent stopped me with, “I’ve got eight different logins, five different interfaces and dozens of manual workarounds.”
That’s when it hit me: it wasn’t that these folks hated technology. They hated drowning in technology.
At the time, I didn’t have a word for it. But now I know it was my first real-life encounter with cognitive load. And in construction, we’ve been quietly letting it chew away at productivity, safety and morale for years.
Goals Are Great, But Systems Protect the Margin
Anyone who knows me knows I love a good challenge. Sometimes too much. But despite all the plucky optimism I might attempt to muster chasing after an audacious goal, it will never be enough. You simply don’t succeed because you aimed high.
You succeed because your systems didn’t let you fall.
In construction that fall can happen fast, so how do we avoid it?
Risk Averse: The Overlooked (and Inevitable) Gift of Failure
Failure is one of the greatest teachers we’ll ever have…yet construction tends to treat it like an embarrassment.
At the end of the day, every win is built on a graveyard of failures. Somewhere along the way, someone tried something, fell short, dissected what went wrong, adjusted the plan and tried again.
So instead of running from it, how do we build learning from failure into our culture?
